2020 Visions

Bleak visions of the future are nothing new for comic books, but Vertigo manages to be both original and compelling with its 2020 Visions. The book consists of four, three-issue story arcs, in which writer Jamie Delano gives a tour of a mad, but eerily plausible world of disease, desperate sex, renegade militias, and high technology.

The first story arc, “Lust For Life,” takes place in a divided Manhattan. The “Haves” live behind a wall which separates them from the “Have nots.” Alex Woycheck lives on the wrong side of the wall, having been forced out after the politically correct government decreed that the smut he peddled was against the law. Now he spends his days trading drugs and credit chips, searching out rare pornography to sell to collectors behind the wall. It wasn’t much, but it was a living—until he contracted the Plague. His days numbered, this outcast must search for the rumored cure, even as the outcasts in life avoid him.